World Embracing Spirituality

The Arts

O God, whom saints and angels delight to worship in heaven: Be ever present with your servants who seek through art and music to perfect the praises offered by your people on earth; and grant to them even now glimpses of your beauty, and make them worthy at length to behold it unveiled for evermore; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. -Book of Common Prayer, p. 819

"Since the earliest centuries, the church has employed sign and symbol and image to draw men and women more deeply into the life of Christ. ...As we experience God's creative hand through the work of these visual artists, perhaps we will see with greater clarity our own identity and charisms as a community of faith, and know more fully what we are to share with our world." -The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold; Presiding Bishop and Primate; The Episcopal Church. -From his welcome to the Episcopal Church and Visual Arts website.

Websites on the arts

The Episcopal Actor's Guild - Supports members of the theater community to continue their careers despite economic difficulties, the Episcopal Actors' Guild of America Inc. provides aid to musicians, actors, dancers, playwrights and directors of all races, religion and class.

The Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts - A web gallery of artists

Bruce Pellegrin Art - Icons displayed at churches in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Social Issues

Here's a example from Rowan Williams of engaging political and social issues from the of faith

Archbishop of Canterbury delivers the 2002 Richard Dimbleby Lecture

In his first major address, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams described the emergence of a new market-based model of the state: "By pushing politics towards a consumerist model, with the state as the guarantor of 'purchasing power', [the market state] raises short-term expectations. By raising short-term expectations it invites instability, reactive administration, rule by opinion poll and pressure."

From the address --

..When people make choices about the more distant future, about things that won't directly affect them as individuals, they do so presumably because they see their own choices here and now as part of a larger story that makes sense of their lives and gives them a context. This is the sort of thing you do if this is how you want to see the overall pattern of the human world turning out, never mind whether it's the most profitable course of action here and now for you as an individual. So if you see your choices here and now in the context of a larger story, this is a way of giving some sort of shape or sense to your own life, some sort of continuity to it. People learn how to tell the story of their own lives in a coherent way when they have some broader picture to which to relate it. You can only tell the story of your own life, it seems, when it isn't just your story, or even the story of those immediately close to you.....

..And all this is possible because we all at some level work with a usually unspoken sense of what a fuller or more mature human life looks like. We all know the frustration of trying to relate to someone who doesn't seem to learn, who doesn't notice when their experience appears to lead them round in circles. We need ways of getting a story straight so that we don't have to go on repeating it, repeating patterns of behaviour that never move us on....

...All good therapy and counselling have something to do with this business of getting the story straight; but what is different about religious belief is its bold claim that there is a story of the whole universe without which your own story won't make sense....

...But here is one of the paradoxes of the transition to a new model of the state. Because of its abandonment of a clear morality for the public sphere, the market state is in danger of linking its legitimacy, its right to be taken seriously by citizens, to its capacity to maximise varieties of personal insurance; but as it does so, it reinforces those elements in popular political culture that undermine the very idea of reasonable politics, the rule of law and the education of active citizens. What if the answer to why we should do what government tells us in the new
era had something to do with the willingness of the market state government to engage with traditional religious communities in a new way, so as at least to keep alive the question of what persons and things relate to before they relate to anyone's particular wants and plans?...

...Now this is going to sound dangerous to many, especially in an audience like this. Institutional religion has a history of violence, of nurturing bitter exclusivism and claiming powers for which it will answer to no-one body. So the challenge for religious communities is how we are to offer our vision, not in a bid for social control but as a way of opening up some of the depth of human choices, offering resources for the construction of growing and critical human identities. And this also means, incidentally but not insignificantly, that religions have work to do intellectually and imaginatively to defend their basic credibility, their truth claims

What kind of social vision emerges from the Anglo-Catholic tradition? Kenneth Leech,

First, it is a corporate vision. It is a social vision, a vision of a cooperative society, a community bonded together by a fundamental and unbreakable solidarity, a community of equals....

Secondly, it is a materialist vision. It is a vision which is deeply and unashamedly materialistic, which values the creation, which rejoices in the physical, in the flesh, in human sexuality, and which is rooted in the principle that matter is the vehicle of spirit, not its enemy. When [William] Temple said that Christianity was the most materialistic of all religions, he stood within a long tradition of incarnational and materialism....

Thirdly, it is a vision of transformation, of a transformed society, not simply an improved one. At the heart of Anglo-Catholic spirituality is the eucharistic offering with its two-fold emphasis on offering and consecration. Bread and wine, fruits of the earth and work of human hands, products not only of nature but of the industrial process, are, at the eucharistic offertory, brought within the redemptive process....

Fourthly, this tradition is a rebel tradition. The Tractarian movement began as a critique of the church/Tory alliance and as a protest against state control of the church.... And this culture of dissent was intensified by the fact that ritualism became a criminal offence in the second phase of the movement. So Anglo-Catholicism and a rebellious spirit became allies....

Finally, the Anglo-Catholic social vision is one which moves beyond the Christian community and is concerned with the working out of God's purposes in the upheavals and crises of world history. It is a Kingdom theology rather than a church theology....Source: Kenneth Leech, The Renewal of Social Vision: A Dissident Anglo-Catholic Perspective , in The Anglo-Catholic Social Conscience: Two Critical Essays (Croyden: Jubilee Group, [1991]), 1-11.

Civic Involvement

Episcopalians have a history of civic involvement. We are committed to service in the world. One of the promises made in baptism is to strive for justice and peace. It's estimated that Episcopal churches and organizations deliver between $250-300 million each year of assistance to people less fortunate than ourselves. We have a tradition of political activity --Many Episcopalians serve as members of local community organizations, on school boards, and in elected political office. As of 2003 there are 34 Episcopal Members in the House of Representatives and 10 members of the Senate who are members of the Episcopal Church. That amounts to 10% of the Senate and 12% of the House. The Episcopal Church makes up 0.8% of the total U.S. population; the Episcopalians in Congress represent 10 times the amount of Episcopalians found in the general population.